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The bad light in the Kurzman offices had injured my eyes, and, just after the panic had subsided, my doctor ordered a sea trip. I sailed on the barque Dora for Hamburg—thirty days for $35, and no extra charge for the excitement that was thrown in.

We were undermanned and underprovisioned. The first mate was ill when we set out from Jersey Flats; because of that, two of the crew had deserted, leaving only eight men aboard. There was no doctor among these, and the Captain and I read a thumbed work on medicine that adorned his cabin, studied the remedies that it suggested, and nearly emptied the medicine chest in trying to cure the poor fellow, who lost sixty pounds under our ministrations and, at the voyage’s end, went home with his disease still undiagnosed.

Meanwhile, the crew were dissatisfied on account of the extra work forced on them by the inactivity of the mate and the absence of the deserters, and also with their rations. They won the second mate to their side, and, on a day of storm when they declared themselves too few to handle the sails, he led something like an old-fashioned mutiny. They crowded toward the Captain.